Investigate festival-wire posts canonical URL indexing issue

[chubes4]

Festival-wire posts on wire.extrachill.com appear to be treating extrachill.com as canonical, causing Google to index extrachill.com/festival-wire instead of the intended wire.extrachill.com location.

Investigation Findings

Current Canonical URL System

• Individual Posts: Use WordPress core get_permalink() → should point to wire.extrachill.com
• Taxonomy Archives: Cross-site canonical authority system prioritizes by post count (wire → main → events)
• OG URLs: Use same canonical authority logic as taxonomy archives

Potential Root Causes

1. OG URL Meta Tags on Taxonomy Archives

   • When viewing festival taxonomy archives on wire.extrachill.com
   • If main site has more posts for that festival term
   • OG URL meta tag points to extrachill.com (correct behavior for archives)
   • Google may be treating this as canonical for the content

2. Content Migration Issues

   • Festival_wire posts may not have been properly migrated to wire.extrachill.com
   • Postmeta or taxonomy relationships might still reference old URLs

3. Canonical Authority Logic

   • System correctly implemented with no hardcoded blog IDs
   • Uses ec_get_blog_id() helpers throughout
   • Post count tie-breaking may favor main site over wire

Recommended Investigation Steps

1. Verify Current State

   • Check Google Search Console indexing for wire.extrachill.com
   • Confirm actual canonical URLs in page source for festival_wire posts
   • Verify post counts per festival term across sites

2. Debug Canonical Output

   • Test ec_seo_get_canonical_url() function for festival_wire posts
   • Check OG URL meta tags on taxonomy archives vs individual posts
   • Verify taxonomy canonical authority resolution

3. Content Audit

   • Ensure all festival_wire posts exist only on wire.extrachill.com
   • Check for any cross-site post duplication or redirects

4. Google Re-indexing

   • Submit sitemaps for wire.extrachill.com
   • Request re-indexing if canonical URLs are actually correct

Files to Review

• extrachill-seo/inc/core/open-graph.php (canonical URL generation)
• extrachill-multisite/inc/cross-site-links/canonical-authority.php (taxonomy authority)
• Festival taxonomy term post counts across sites

Expected Behavior

• Individual festival_wire posts should have canonical URLs pointing to wire.extrachill.com
• Google should index wire.extrachill.com URLs, not extrachill.com/festival-wire

Priority

Medium - Affects SEO and discoverability of wire content

[chubes4]

GSC-confirmed: festival-wire is indexed under the MAIN domain, not wire

Verified 2026-06-15 via GSC URL Inspection + page-stats (domain property extrachill.com).

The hard evidence

inspect_url on a top main-domain festival-wire URL returns:

user_canonical:    https://wire.extrachill.com/festival-wire/...   ← what the page declares (correct)
google_canonical:  https://extrachill.com/festival-wire/...        ← what Google actually CHOSE (old main URL)
verdict:           PASS / Submitted and indexed
last_crawl:        2026-06-11

Page-stats split (last 28d):

Domain	FW URLs indexed	Clicks	Impressions
extrachill.com/festival-wire (old)	1,601	682	53,164
wire.extrachill.com/festival-wire (intended)	1	0	1

URL inspection on wire URLs of every age (1 day → months old) returns URL is unknown to Google — Google has never crawled the wire variants.

Root cause (refined)

This is not a code bug. The page-level canonical tags are CORRECT (verified in HTML at origin and via CF — both point to wire). The issue is post-migration canonical lag: the old extrachill.com/festival-wire/* URLs have years of historical authority, so Google keeps them as the indexed canonical despite the declared wire canonical + the 301.

Fix is already applied — now in the consolidation window

• ✅ Page canonicals point to wire
• ✅ 301 main→wire in place (and hardened by extrachill-multisite#54, merged 2026-06-15, which validates slugs before forwarding so stale/-2 variants stop 404ing)
• ✅ Wire sitemap submitted to GSC 2026-05-30; Google downloaded it 2026-06-11 (submitted: 2312, indexed: 0)

Nothing more to build. This needs time + monitoring for Google to recrawl the 2,312 wire URLs and transfer canonical authority off the legacy main URLs. The clean-301 fix (#54) accelerates consolidation.

Recommended status

Keep open as a monitor until GSC inspect_url on wire festival-wire URLs flips to google_canonical = wire. No code action pending.